Before Kamala Harris entered the presidential race, the group of Democrats that met every Thursday in San Jose to speak politics and write postcards for the candidates had shrunk to 4 or five – sometimes just two or three.
But just five days after the Bay Area native rose to the highest of the Democratic ticket, they pushed several tables together in San Pedro Square to accommodate all 20 people. One wore a tank top with a big comma and the letters LA – a play on the right pronunciation of Harris' first name: “comma-la.”
“I was able to gain new energy,” said Stacy Palermini, 59, the identical age because the vp. “Nothing could stop me.”
Harris' candidacy has flipped the mood within the party from “doom scrolling” the grim news following President Joe Biden's disastrous debate performance and the MAGA surge on the Republican National Convention to “hope scrolling” the headlines about record donations, the following conference call with 160,000 white women, TikTok memes and growing support. The expected endorsement of former President Barack Obama got here on Friday.
“I was totally scared,” said Erik Martinez, an LGBTQ activist from San Francisco. Now, he said, “I definitely feel very empowered and excited. I was just talking to a few friends yesterday about how we all kind of feel the same energy that we felt during Obama's first presidential campaign.”
Trump, who seemed on his method to victory before Biden's withdrawal, has already attacked his recent rival, blaming her for the issues of the Biden-Harris administration, including the border crisis and inflation. On Thursday, Trump called Harris a “madwoman” and a “California socialist.”
And if Republicans fear that Harris would have a greater likelihood of defeating Trump, they are usually not letting it show.
“I have no concerns at all. I'm telling you, Trump will be president,” said Jan Soule, president of the Silicon Valley Association of Conservative Republicans. “To be clear, anyone who knows Kamala here knows that she will be no harder to beat than Joe Biden.”
But Harris' entry into the race has not only revived Palermini's feminist group Solidarity Sundays, founded in 2017 to withstand Donald Trump's presidency, but has also inspired the relaunch of a sister organization within the East Bay and motivated quite a few Democrats within the Bay Area to mobilize their resources and open their wallets.
“I've donated three times in the last week just to say, 'I'm here, I'm present and I'm there, and we're going to make this happen,'” said Zoe Ellis, a Richmond choir director who was certainly one of 40,000 Black women who joined a Zoom call this week to support Harris.
Even Pantsuit Nation, a national grassroots group that encouraged women to wear Hillary Clinton-style pantsuits to the polls in 2016, is regaining momentum.
“All I'm saying,” wrote certainly one of the Facebook group members, “Kamala looks stunning in a pantsuit.”
But can Harris keep the momentum going? Her first presidential campaign in 2020 was so poorly managed and short-lived that she did not make it to the Iowa caucuses. Her campaign speeches throughout the 2020 Biden campaign often seemed uninspired.
But over the past two years, she has gained momentum in her latest role, which has criticized the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and conservative states that severely restrict abortion access – a brand new talent and a critical issue that Bruce Cain, a professor of political science at Stanford University, believes will serve her well.
“She seems to have improved as a candidate,” Cain said. “She doesn't have to be Barack Obama. She just has to be able to explain well” why she is best for the country.
According to a New York Times-Sienna College poll conducted this week, Harris is already harder to beat than Biden. Among likely voters, Trump remains to be ahead, but only by a razor-thin margin: Trump is at 48 percent, Harris at 47 percent.
Zina Slaughter of Richmond said she would do whatever she could to get Harris to defect.
“I'm definitely going to be making phone calls and doing phone canvassing,” said Slaughter, a member of Harris' sorority who also participated within the Zoom call for black women. “I'm looking into actually doing some door-to-door canvassing and helping organize some voter mobilization.”
This also applies to Debbie Mesloh, who worked on all of Harris' campaigns in California and flew to Maricopa County, Arizona, in 2020 to knock on doors and persuade voters to solid their ballots for the Biden-Harris ticket.
“We're going to raise money and organize in our community – women, lawyers, former employees, her friends, people from the gym in San Francisco, people from her favorite cookie shop,” Mesloh said. “They're going to dig deep and do whatever it takes to help her win.”
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